When a moment later the shooting stopped altogether, Ryan knew the chillers were concentrating on closing the distance before the companions could reach the high ground.
“Forget the frog!” he told Mildred, Dean, Leeloo and Krysty as they dashed past him. “Straight to the top! Triple fast!”
Ryan sent J.B., Doc and Jak up ahead of him. The albino grabbed Doc under one armpit and J.B. took the other. They half carried the old man as they ran. After three more bends, the track straightened. Ryan could see the light breaking through the tops of the trees above them. The road rose even more steeply as it approached the summit. By the time he reached the edge of the tree line, Mildred, Krysty and Jak were on their bellies on the crown of the road, sighting their handblasters down the straight stretch. He moved past them and joined J.B. who was already doing a recce of the summit.
There was no hardsite for them to defend. The crest of the summit was rock, all right, but it was as flat as a pancake. The densely forested ridge bracketed the top of the road, which continued steeply down on the other side of the crest.
Words weren’t necessary between the two longtime trail buddies.
It was bad.
Bastard bad.
They both knew the chillers could filter through the ridgetop trees and flank them if they tried to make a stand on the summit.
“Get up!” Ryan told the others as he turned back from the table of rock. “We can’t stay here. We’ve got to keep running. Cross the summit and take the road down the other side.”
One hundred fifty feet below him, at the start of the straightaway he’d just climbed, four rousties tried to cross the road.
In a single, fluid movement, Ryan shouldered the Steyr, dropped the safety and snap fired.
The longblaster boomed like a cannon under the canopy of tree branches.
A heavy-caliber bullet skipped harmlessly off the road between the chillers, but the near miss made them throw themselves headfirst into the brush. And, Ryan thought, as he broke from the crest and ran after the others, it would give them something to worry about as they worked their way up through the trees.
As he sprinted down the descending road, he got his first glimpse of the little lake. From the high angle of view, it looked like a predark painting or advertisement—serene, pastoral, inviting.
What appeared to be steam or fog hung over part of its mirrorlike surface. With chillers at his back, Ryan had no time to examine the placid panorama more closely. He raced to catch up with his companions, who were already nearing the muddy shore.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Thick brown muck sucked at Mildred’s boot soles as she struggled around the denuded perimeter of the lake. She couldn’t run through the mud; it was too deep. And trying to run made her boots sink in past her ankles, which slowed her even more. She wasn’t alone; the other companions had the same problem.
Inside the dead zone of the lake’s shoreline, the few remaining trees were long dead, barkless, bleached, eroded smooth. Like gigantic, stripped bones jutting from the wet earth.
What could have caused it? she wondered.
Something to do with the lake, obviously. Some localized toxicity or disaster perhaps springing from skydark. It occurred to her that the lake might be sitting over a volcanic vent. But there was no telltale aroma of sulfide. The smell was of intense biological decay. Not just swamp, though. Latrine. Abattoir.
She noted other scattered boot prints and the deep wheel tracks in the soft ground. Someone else had been here, and recently, she thought. So the place was probably safe enough.
While the other companions trudged slowly ahead, Mildred paused for breath. She turned and glanced up at the summit. She saw Ryan coming down the steep road in great strides, his longblaster in his hand. There was no sign of the chillers yet. She took the opportunity to lever open the cylinder of her ZKR 551 target revolver and dump out its two spent shells. She thumbed in a pair of live bullets, then snapped the cylinder shut. This done, she stuck her hand back in the bag pocket of her fatigue pants and counted the loose .38-caliber cartridges. There were eight left.